I have to admit I almost refused to see Toy Story 3 on it's opening weekend. I'm a fan of Pixar, love their work. However, several things made me skeptic of it.



For starters, it's the 3rd movie, through my life it seems that on the odd occasion whenever I see a 3rd movie in a theater they seem to be an underwhelming experience. Some examples being Blade Trinity and Matrix Revolution.



The marketing, good lord the marketing. Of course, being a disney product, there is the massive glut of advertising. Toys, happy meals, toothbrushes, whole aisles at wal-mart, target, etc. Enough to make you sick. Along with seeing the assault for Shrek, that Train your Dragon whatzamahoozit, I can't buy a loaf of bread without seeing Buzz or Woody plastered on some display. If I was a bit smarter or well read, I would type up some spiel about kids advertising but you probably have enough rants about that rattling in your head already.

Somehow, I ended up at my local mall, looking for a decently priced used game (gamestop and the local used game/movie stores are damn crooks and/or supremely understocked). After that disappointment I winded up in line at the theater pondering between Get Him To The Greek or Toy Story 3. Picking the latter, I walked into the theater full of families with surprisingly non-screaming kids, weird. The pre-show thing assaulted everyone with ads for toys, new cartoon networks shows, and the official Toy Story 3 video game. Then the lights dimmed for the trailers, christ. Just horrible horrible cliched kid movie trailers that I hope that I don't remember completely. Some CGI Rapunzel thing, loser wolf gets hot chick wolf, CGI smurfs, the only one I found slightly interesting was Mastermind (Will Ferrell voices a wanna be supervillain against a superman clone, the “Lois Lane” being voiced by Tina Fey). But finally we get to the new Pixar short “Day & Night”, a well done piece that really reminds me of the old Chuck Jones cartoons. It has a neat little message in the end.

Finally the main feature. Fans of the series will be pleasantly surprised to see a “new vision” of the original opening scene from the first movie, followed by clips of home videos shot by Andy's mom fast forwarding to the present. Andy's getting ready to go off to college, leaving an uncertain future for the remainder of Andy's toys. This leads them to their next big adventure, daycare. Everything flows smoothly, plenty of stuff to chuckle at and think about. The new toys are cool, there's even a Totoro cameo (I gotta get one of those...and an evil monkey). I have to say I think this makes a perfect end to the Toy Story movies, definitely worth seeing, I'm glad I fought through my expectations to see it.